The concept of continuing formal education of information-based professionals is an idea which is both important and necessary. It is important because, in our rapidly changing world, a professional individual cannot maintain maximum effectiveness unless he is able to constantly review and revise his knowledge of his particular field. This is true of all disciplines, including law, medicine, engineering, and science. Both the individual and society have an interest in maximizing the effectiveness of the individual professional by maximizing the currency of his knowledge.
Formalized, and even mandatory, continuing education is necessary because even the most dedicated professional can find perfectly reasonable excuses for not seeking to update his knowledge. Given a choice between tending immediately to the needs of a patient or client, on one hand, or, on the other hand, studying information which may or may not be of immediate use, places the professional in an unfair dilemma. This dilemma is made all the more destructive if the continuing education medium is, or is perceived to be, inefficient, ineffective, inconvenient, or uninteresting.
One stalwart of the traditional continuing education system is the classroom concept, carried over from the traditional school environment. Numerous aspects of the classroom system render the approach of marginal value in a continuing education program. Inflexibility of scheduling, necessary to plan for a large number of participants and the necessity for the participants to travel to a location central enough to be available to a sufficient number of participants, render the approach of limited value.
Another primary basis of traditional continuing education involves the professional publication. Use of the professional publication in a continuing education program is necessarily limited because of the nature of the publication. First of all, the traditional professional publication is not necessarily designed as an educational tool, but rather is an instrument by which researchers publish the initial announcement of their breakthroughs. Elaborating the practical implications of the breakthroughs is generally not the primary objective of the authors, so that those practical aspects are often buried in a mass of "scientific" information. Furthermore the publication provides no feedback mechanism by which the individual professional can determine whether he understood what he read; nor does it provide a mechanism for society to know whether he understood what he read, or even if he read the material.
The modern continuing education approach has integrated a testing component into the traditional professional publication approach. Generally, a publication will include a classroom-type examination to be taken after the professional has read the materials in the publication. The examination is taken by the professional and mailed to a centralized program administrator. The administrator grades the examinations and indicates to the professional whether he received a passing grade. The practical implementation of this type of program has numerous shortcomings. First of all, the classroom-type written examination is generally not a very stimulating or interesting exercise. Furthermore, the feedback given to the professional by a grade is generally rather unenlightening in terms of indicating where his shortcomings were or any other type of information about the nature of his new knowledge. In addition, the grade generally does not come back for some period of time. Finally, if the grade is poor, it can easily discourage the student and curtail his enthusiasm. For these reasons, the examination process is not the stimulating and educational experience that it would be if the examination were conducted on a person-to-person basis in which an interrogator could respond immediately to the students answers. The concept of person-to-person dialogue, either in person or over the telephone, is most desirable, but, as a practical matter, is impossible.
These and other difficulties experienced with the prior art systems have been obviated in a novel manner by the present invention.
Therefore, the outstanding object of this invention is to provide an educational system in which a student at a remote location can interact with an automated educational center.
Another object of this invention is the provision of an educational system in which the interaction takes place over ordinary telephone lines.
A further object of the present invention is the provision of an educational system in which the student is able to respond to interrogation from the central system by using the machine-distinguishable signals generated by the standard pushbutton type telephone instrument commonly known under the trademark Touch-Tone.
It is another object of the instant invention to provide an educational system in which the student is interrogated, provided with multiple choice answers, chooses an answer, and then is immediately presented with information concerning his answer.
A still further object of the invention is the provision of an educational system in which the student can participate at a time and place totally of his or her choice.
It is a further object of the invention to provide an educational system which provides maximum educational effectiveness with minimum cost and inconvenience.
It is a still further object of the present invention to provide an educational system which easily and inexpensively generates information which can be used by vendors to isolate potential customers.
With these and other objects in view, as will be apparent to those skilled in the art, the invention resides in the combination of parts set forth in the specification and covered by the claims appended hereto.